Of course Obama wanted to be by water on his presidential vacation!

Even a leader of the free
world deserves a break, so
tomorrow U.S. President
Barack Obama and his family
start their summer vacation.
His predecessor just loved to
get away. George W. Bush
spent one-sixth of his presidency
at his ranch in Texas
and took more days off – 1,020
– than any other occupant of
the White House.

The Obamas are raising eyebrows
as well, but for a different
reason – because, to the
surprise of many in these penny-
pinching times, they are going
in such style, staying at a
$20-million compound on
Martha’s Vineyard, island playground
for the rich and famous.p
Located in Chilmark, which
was listed just two years ago as
America’s most expensive
small town, Blue Heron Farm
spans 28 acres and rents for
$50,000 a week. It offers such
recreation options as a private
beach, pool, cinema, golf practice
tee and an added plus for
the hoops-loving President: a
basketball court.

As well, the farm has something
that would have made it
an even bigger draw to many
of Mr. Obama’s predecessors: a
private dock. Presidents, according
to Herbert Hoover,
have just two opportunities for
personal reflection: “prayer
and fishing – and they can’t
pray all the time.”

THRILL OF THE CHASE

Over the years, fishing also has
brought many a vacationing
president north of the border,
beginning with one who
claimed that he did so only by
accident.

Chester Arthur was elevated
to the Oval Office after the assassination
of James Garfield
in 1881; a year earlier, he had
been a founding member of
the famed Restigouche Salmon
Club, described in The New
York Times of June 8, 1880, as
“40 gentlemen who have organized
themselves into an association
and opened a private
fishing and shooting preserve
in the Acadian wilderness of
New Brunswick.”

At the time, protocol required
that presidents holiday
at home, so rather than chase
salmon in Canada, Arthur took
his 1883 break in the St. Lawrence
River’s beautiful Thousand
Islands region. In stark
contrast to the massive security
that will accompany the
Obamas, he arrived with a valet,
a lone Secret Service agent
and the only reporter who
managed to tracked him down.
Mr. Obama will have his
BlackBerry to stay in touch,
but the New York Sun’s Julian
Ralph told his readers that Arthur
“seems to be as far removed
from news of what is
going on throughout the land
as he is from news centres
themselves. He has no callers
of note. He gets no daily newspaper
and … he used the telegraph
very little.”

Even so, he managed to
cause a minor scandal, according
to Bill Mares, author of
Fishing With the Presidents.
“Early in the week he had explicitly
ordered the crew to
avoid Canadian waters so that
he would not break the precedent
that sitting presidents
never leave the United States.”

But this was also a man who
had once pulled a record 50-
pound salmon from Quebec’s
Cascapedia River. So, by the
end of the week, “he was perfectly
content to go where the
fish were, which included
Queen Victoria’s dominion.”

Decades later, William Howard
Taft refused to bend the
rules, yet he pined for his beloved
cottage at Murray Bay,
now Malbaie on the north
shore of the St. Lawrence east
of Quebec City.

Globe and Mail columnist
Lawrence Martin writes in his
book The Presidents and the
Prime Ministers that mere
weeks after settling into the
White House, Taft wrote to his
brother: “If I only have one
term … one of the great consolations
will be that I can go
to Murray Bay in the summers
thereafter.”

He got his wish and after
leaving office in 1913 holidayed
in Quebec often until his
death in 1930.

MANITOULIN MISSION

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
another great angler, although
he claimed that “I don’t give a
continental damn whether I
catch a fish or not,” and clearly
was much less of a stickler for
the rules. He not only visited
his summer home at Campobello,
N.B., throughout his
presidency, he made a secret
trek in the midst of the Second
World War to fish off Ontario’s
Manitoulin Island just days before
he would return to Canada
for the first Quebec
Conference with Winston
Churchill and Mackenzie King.

Which may be why the vacationing
FDR was, unlike Chester
Arthur, anything but out of
touch, according to his chief of
staff. In his memoirs, Admiral
William D. Leahy recalls:

“We lived for a week in a 10-
car train which was parked on
a siding within a few yards of
the landing from which we
embarked on the daily fishing
trips. Roosevelt and I were the
winners in the pool for the biggest
catch (at) week end. The
days brought fresh air, sunburn,
and relaxation. The
nights often were taken up
with handling messages to and
from our British allies regarding
the Italian campaign, a
proposal to make Rome an
open city (which military authorities
did not favour), and
the general war situation.
“My only complaint with the
routine was that on a vacation
to rest and to relax, we should
have gone to bed earlier than
midnight.”

Richard Nixon wasn’t much
of a fisherman and as president
spent most holidays in
Key Biscayne at his “Florida
White House.” But he did
come to Canada as vice-president,
landing at Picton on
Lake Ontario during a 1957
boating trip with secretary of
state John Foster Dulles.
As he recalled in a 1972
speech in Ottawa, the experience
did little for his ego. “We
decided to go to one of the local
pubs, just as we were. …
After we had finished and
were ready to leave, the waiter
came up and said, ‘Sir, if you
don’t mind, I have a bet with
the bartender … I bet him $5
that you are Vice-President
Nixon.’

“I said, ‘Well, call him over
and we will confirm it.’ So the
bartender came over and said,
‘I would never have believed
it,’ … and as we started to
move on, I heard him mumble
to the waiter, ‘You know, he
doesn’t look near as bad in
person as he does in his pictures.’
”

Most presidents have enjoyed
better relations with Canadians
– including some who
have shared holiday time with
our prime ministers, most notably
Pierre Trudeau and Brian
Mulroney.

The late Gerald Ford once recalled
that not long after inheriting
the presidency from
Mr. Nixon, he was on a ski vacation
in Colorado when he
heard that Mr. Trudeau was
nearby on a visit to NORAD
headquarters. An invitation
was issued and before long Mr.
Ford discovered that the prime
minister was “a very good
skier – a lot better than I was.”
Thus began a friendship that
lasted into their political retirement.
A holiday tradition that continues
to this day began in
1989, when Mr. Mulroney first
travelled to the Maine summer
home of George H.W. Bush, a
passionate fly fisherman who
has often wet a line in Canadian
waters.

OBAMA’S WARMUP

This year, Mr. Obama is highly
unlikely to cross any borders,
but that private dock on Martha’s
Vineyard may well see
some angling action.
During a visit to Montana
last weekend, he took a twohour
break from his duties for
a fly-fishing lesson on the storied
East Gallatin River in A
River Runs Through It country.
The session was closed to the
media, but, according to all reports,
the rookie performed
very well, hooking several
trout, although none actually
made it to shore.

Even worse, Mr. Obama discovered
that presidential private
time may be off limits to
the media but not his critics:
After his Montana outing,
many of them wanted to know
whether the 44th President
had bothered to shell out for a
fishing licence.

After all, as Herbert Hoover
once said, “all men are equal
before fish.”

[Arthur Milnes, a fellow of the
Centre for the Study of Democracy
at Queen’s University, is the editor
of In Roosevelt’s Bright Shadow
(2009), a collection of presidential
addresses in and about Canada,
and co-editor of the forthcoming
Age of the Offered Hand, essays
about George H.W. Bush’s relationship
with Brian Mulroney.]